In this modern dating culture, I don’t understand what love is anymore. Maybe, love is as easy as swapping your screen to the right or left and going on a date with someone you’ve matched on Tinder. Sometimes love is about having the first chemistry of a person based on their profile pictures, their followers, and the things they’ve posted on social media. RELATED: If You’ve Been Told That You’re Hard To Love, Here’s The Truth Other times, love is about stalking their profile just to figure out who they truly are, even before your first date. Love is about guessing his or her personality by seeing those mutual friends that you had in common.
Love is waiting for your phone to ring and wondering when you will receive his text messages. It’s about questioning why they haven’t seen your Instagram story or liked your latest selfie.
Love is about reading their text messages immediately, but you’ll take another hour to reply, just to make them understand that you’re hard to get. It’s about making them wonder whether you’re into them or vice versa by guessing how long you respond to their texts. Love is about guessing feelings by their latest status updates and tweets. If you are in a relationship, maybe love is about trying to find the right angle of you and your boyfriend for the picture that you’ll post with #relationshipgoals as the caption. Love is about saving money for your next travel journey with your girlfriend to use as content for your Instagram feed. It’s about doing each of the activities on your bucket list with your partner to make your vlog on YouTube more interesting than the previous ones. Love is about sharing your Saturday night with him through a series of Instagram stories. Maybe, love is about Netflix and chill or it’s about reading countless self-help articles about the signs whether he’s still into you. Love is about changing your relationship status on Facebook. Love is about having a garden-party-themed wedding where everyone could take some Instagram pictures to be posted on their social media.
In this modern dating culture, love is about having a “screen connection,” not the real connection.
RELATED: 8 Things To Consider Before Giving Up On Love When we talk about love in this modern dating world, it’s no longer about one’s deep feeling of affection towards someone. In this digital era, love is about being fast. In this day and age, it’s about being fast to get their texts, to pick up their calls, to get acknowledgment from the world that you’ve found the one. Love is no longer a private and intimate feeling, but it’s about having the urgency to show it off to the world. In this modern dating world, the true meaning of love is fading away. We start to forget that love is about building a true and deep connection with someone through a face-to-face interaction. It’s about having a non-stop deep conversation while you’re having a dinner date with him or her without even wanting to check your phone. Love is about understanding each other’s feelings through direct body language without over-analyzing those text messages that she/he sent. As cliché as it sounds, in this modern dating world, love is still about showing up. It’s about making the effort to meet them halfway. It’s about the closure and intimacy that you get after you have direct interaction with someone.
In this digital era, love has nothing to do with our phone screens. Our internet connection may be a part of our intimacy, but it isn’t the main thing; we need to be able to build a deep connection with someone.
We are the generation who wants everything to be instant and fast, while love requires patience and time; who glorifies recognition from others, while love is about being enough only for each other; who believes that love is defined by society’s standards, while a true love has its own different meaning for each of us. We are the generation who seek true love, yet we’re also the ones who lost it. In this modern dating world, love starts to lose its true meaning. RELATED: I’m Only 22, I Don’t Want Someone Else To Be My Whole World Rayi Noormega is a writer for Thought Catalog and Unwritten. She has also been published at Elite Daily, Magdalene, Huffington Post, The Jakarta Post, and more. For more of her content, visit her website. This article was originally published at Unwritten. Reprinted with permission from the author.
